Computing

Computing

Personal Computers

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I first became interested in computers back in 1980. At that time if you were not employed in the field you were probably considered a geek of some sort. Well I don't think I was a geek only a forward thinker as is evident by where we are today in the twenty-first century.

My very first computer was a Texas Instruments "TI 99 / 4A". The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A was a neat little computer that was never really given a chance. It came out somewhere around the same time as the Commodore VIC-20. It originally cost quite a bit, but the price soon fell to the level of competing 8-bit processors. Most of its software ran from cartridges, called Command Modules. It was the first small personal computer to have a 16-bit processor. It also had a radical silver and black case. And, for awhile, also included a Speech Synthesizer module that sounded remarkably good.

This little computer did not come with a monitor so you needed to use the family TV set.

Unfortunately, the TI-99/4A had several other strikes against it:

	Bill Cosby was the pitchman. (Is there anything this man won't sell?) Commodore had William Shatner, who was much cooler.
	Used a normal cassette player for storage. This requires fiddling with cables and volume levels. Commodore's dedicated Data cassette player was much easier to use, and more reliable at writing and reading information.
	Required a large expansion box in order to add memory. Even with expansion, BASIC programs only had 12K for code.
	Was rumored to be very slow. (Turns out it was very slow in BASIC, due to its BASIC being doubly interpreted. But it was much faster at the machine language level.)

Which is too bad. It was a nice little computer that deserved a little more attention. Later versions of the TI-99/4A used a more standard, but less cool, color scheme.